Alison Gopnik: What do babies think?

395,642 views ・ 2011-10-10

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00:15
What is going on
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in this baby's mind?
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If you'd asked people this 30 years ago,
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most people, including psychologists,
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would have said that this baby was irrational,
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illogical, egocentric --
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that he couldn't take the perspective of another person
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or understand cause and effect.
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In the last 20 years,
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developmental science has completely overturned that picture.
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So in some ways,
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we think that this baby's thinking
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is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.
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Let me give you just one example of this.
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One thing that this baby could be thinking about,
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that could be going on in his mind,
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is trying to figure out
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what's going on in the mind of that other baby.
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After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do
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is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling.
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And maybe the hardest thing of all
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is to figure out that what other people think and feel
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isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel.
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Anyone who's followed politics can testify
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to how hard that is for some people to get.
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We wanted to know
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if babies and young children
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could understand this really profound thing about other people.
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Now the question is: How could we ask them?
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Babies, after all, can't talk,
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and if you ask a three year-old
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to tell you what he thinks,
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what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue
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about ponies and birthdays and things like that.
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So how do we actually ask them the question?
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Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli.
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What we did -- Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I --
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was actually to give the babies two bowls of food:
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one bowl of raw broccoli
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and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers.
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Now all of the babies, even in Berkley,
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like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli.
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(Laughter)
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But then what Betty did
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was to take a little taste of food from each bowl.
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And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't.
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So half the time, she acted
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as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli --
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just like a baby and any other sane person.
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But half the time,
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what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli
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and go, "Mmmmm, broccoli.
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I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm."
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And then she would take a little bit of the crackers,
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and she'd go, "Eww, yuck, crackers.
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I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck."
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So she'd act as if what she wanted
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was just the opposite of what the babies wanted.
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We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies.
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And then she would simply put her hand out and say,
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"Can you give me some?"
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So the question is: What would the baby give her,
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what they liked or what she liked?
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And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies,
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just barely walking and talking,
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would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers,
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but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli.
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On the other hand,
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15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time
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if she acted as if she liked the broccoli,
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like they couldn't figure this out.
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But then after they stared for a long time,
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they would just give her the crackers,
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what they thought everybody must like.
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So there are two really remarkable things about this.
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The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies
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have already discovered
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this really profound fact about human nature,
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that we don't always want the same thing.
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And what's more, they felt that they should actually do things
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to help other people get what they wanted.
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Even more remarkably though,
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the fact that 15 month-olds didn't do this
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suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned
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this deep, profound fact about human nature
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in the three months from when they were 15 months old.
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So children both know more and learn more
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than we ever would have thought.
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And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years
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that's actually demonstrated it.
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The question you might ask though is:
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Why do children learn so much?
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And how is it possible for them to learn so much
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in such a short time?
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I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially,
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they seem pretty useless.
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And actually in many ways, they're worse than useless,
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because we have to put so much time and energy
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into just keeping them alive.
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But if we turn to evolution
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for an answer to this puzzle
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of why we spend so much time
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taking care of useless babies,
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it turns out that there's actually an answer.
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If we look across many, many different species of animals,
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not just us primates,
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but also including other mammals, birds,
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even marsupials
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like kangaroos and wombats,
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it turns out that there's a relationship
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between how long a childhood a species has
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and how big their brains are compared to their bodies
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and how smart and flexible they are.
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And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there.
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On one side
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is a New Caledonian crow.
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And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth,
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are incredibly smart birds.
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They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects.
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And this is a bird on the cover of science
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who's learned how to use a tool to get food.
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On the other hand,
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we have our friend the domestic chicken.
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And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys
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are basically as dumb as dumps.
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So they're very, very good at pecking for grain,
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and they're not much good at doing anything else.
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Well it turns out that the babies,
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the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings.
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They depend on their moms
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to drop worms in their little open mouths
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for as long as two years,
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which is a really long time in the life of a bird.
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Whereas the chickens are actually mature
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within a couple of months.
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So childhood is the reason
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why the crows end up on the cover of Science
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and the chickens end up in the soup pot.
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There's something about that long childhood
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that seems to be connected
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to knowledge and learning.
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Well what kind of explanation could we have for this?
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Well some animals, like the chicken,
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seem to be beautifully suited
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to doing just one thing very well.
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So they seem to be beautifully suited
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to pecking grain in one environment.
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Other creatures, like the crows,
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aren't very good at doing anything in particular,
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but they're extremely good
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at learning about laws of different environments.
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And of course, we human beings
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are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows.
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We have bigger brains relative to our bodies
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by far than any other animal.
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We're smarter, we're more flexible,
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we can learn more,
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we survive in more different environments,
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we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space.
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And our babies and children are dependent on us
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for much longer than the babies of any other species.
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My son is 23.
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(Laughter)
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And at least until they're 23,
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we're still popping those worms
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into those little open mouths.
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All right, why would we see this correlation?
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Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy,
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is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world,
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but it has one big disadvantage.
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And that one big disadvantage
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is that, until you actually do all that learning,
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you're going to be helpless.
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So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you
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and be saying to yourself,
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"A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?"
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You want to know all that
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before the mastodons actually show up.
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And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem
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is with a kind of division of labor.
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So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected.
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We don't have to do anything. All we have to do is learn.
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And then as adults,
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we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children
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and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world.
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So one way of thinking about it
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is that babies and young children
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are like the research and development division of the human species.
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So they're the protected blue sky guys
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who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas,
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and we're production and marketing.
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We have to take all those ideas
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that we learned when we were children
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and actually put them to use.
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Another way of thinking about it
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is instead of thinking of babies and children
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as being like defective grownups,
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we should think about them
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as being a different developmental stage of the same species --
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kind of like caterpillars and butterflies --
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except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies
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who are flitting around the garden and exploring,
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and we're the caterpillars
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who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.
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If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn --
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and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning,
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that's what they're for --
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we might expect
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that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms.
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And in fact, the baby's brain
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seems to be the most powerful learning computer
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on the planet.
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But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better.
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And there's been a revolution
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in our understanding of machine learning recently.
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And it all depends on the ideas of this guy,
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the Reverend Thomas Bayes,
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who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century.
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And essentially what Bayes did
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was to provide a mathematical way
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using probability theory
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to characterize, describe,
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the way that scientists find out about the world.
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So what scientists do
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is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with.
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They go out and test it against the evidence.
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The evidence makes them change that hypothesis.
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Then they test that new hypothesis
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and so on and so forth.
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And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that.
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And that mathematics is at the core
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of the best machine learning programs that we have now.
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And some 10 years ago,
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I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing.
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So if you want to know what's going on
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underneath those beautiful brown eyes,
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I think it actually looks something like this.
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This is Reverend Bayes's notebook.
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So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations
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with conditional probabilities that they're revising
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to figure out how the world works.
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All right, now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate.
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Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics,
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they look extremely stupid.
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How could it be that children are doing statistics?
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So to test this we used a machine that we have
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called the Blicket Detector.
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This is a box that lights up and plays music
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when you put some things on it and not others.
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And using this very simple machine,
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my lab and others have done dozens of studies
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showing just how good babies are
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at learning about the world.
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Let me mention just one
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that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student.
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If I showed you this detector,
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you would be likely to think to begin with
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that the way to make the detector go
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would be to put a block on top of the detector.
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But actually, this detector
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works in a bit of a strange way.
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Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector,
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something you wouldn't ever think of to begin with,
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the detector will actually activate two out of three times.
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Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector,
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it will only activate two out of six times.
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So the unlikely hypothesis
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actually has stronger evidence.
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It looks as if the waving
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is a more effective strategy than the other strategy.
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So we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence,
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and we just asked them to make it go.
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And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence
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to wave the object on top of the detector.
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Now there are two things that are really interesting about this.
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The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds.
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They're just learning how to count.
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But unconsciously,
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they're doing these quite complicated calculations
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that will give them a conditional probability measure.
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And the other interesting thing
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is that they're using that evidence
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to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world,
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that seems very unlikely to begin with.
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And in studies we've just been doing in my lab, similar studies,
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we've show that four year-olds are actually better
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at finding out an unlikely hypothesis
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than adults are when we give them exactly the same task.
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So in these circumstances,
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the children are using statistics to find out about the world,
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but after all, scientists also do experiments,
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and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments.
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When children do experiments we call it "getting into everything"
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or else "playing."
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And there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently
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that have shown this playing around
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is really a kind of experimental research program.
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Here's one from Cristine Legare's lab.
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What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors.
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And what she did was show children
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that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't,
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and then she showed them an anomaly.
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And what you'll see
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is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses
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in the space of two minutes.
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(Video) Boy: How about this?
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Same as the other side.
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Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has just been falsified.
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(Laughter)
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Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing.
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AG: Okay, he's got his experimental notebook out.
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Boy: What's making this light up.
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(Laughter)
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I don't know.
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AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair.
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(Laughter)
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Boy: Oh, it's because this needs to be like this,
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and this needs to be like this.
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AG: Okay, hypothesis two.
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Boy: That's why.
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Oh.
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(Laughter)
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AG: Now this is his next idea.
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He told the experimenter to do this,
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to try putting it out onto the other location.
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Not working either.
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Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here,
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not here.
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Oh, the bottom of this box
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has electricity in here,
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but this doesn't have electricity.
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AG: Okay, that's a fourth hypothesis.
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Boy: It's lighting up.
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So when you put four.
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So you put four on this one to make it light up
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and two on this one to make it light up.
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AG: Okay,there's his fifth hypothesis.
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Now that is a particularly --
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that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy,
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but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical.
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If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something,
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what they really do is do a series of experiments.
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This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds.
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Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature?
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What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies
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who can test five hypotheses in two minutes?
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Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers,
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a lot of them have said
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that babies and young children were barely conscious
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if they were conscious at all.
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And I think just the opposite is true.
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I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults.
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Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works.
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And adults' attention and consciousness
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look kind of like a spotlight.
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So what happens for adults
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is we decide that something's relevant or important,
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we should pay attention to it.
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Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to
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becomes extremely bright and vivid,
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and everything else sort of goes dark.
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And we even know something about the way the brain does this.
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So what happens when we pay attention
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is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains,
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sends a signal
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that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible,
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more plastic, better at learning,
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and shuts down activity
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in all the rest of our brains.
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So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention.
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If we look at babies and young children,
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we see something very different.
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I think babies and young children
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seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness
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than a spotlight of consciousness.
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So babies and young children are very bad
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at narrowing down to just one thing.
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But they're very good at taking in lots of information
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from lots of different sources at once.
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And if you actually look in their brains,
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you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters
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that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity,
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and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet.
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So when we say that babies and young children
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are bad at paying attention,
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what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention.
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So they're bad at getting rid
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of all the interesting things that could tell them something
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and just looking at the thing that's important.
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That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness,
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that we might expect
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from those butterflies who are designed to learn.
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Well if we want to think about a way
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of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults,
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I think the best thing is think about cases
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where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before --
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when we fall in love with someone new,
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or when we're in a new city for the first time.
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And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts,
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it expands,
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so that those three days in Paris
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seem to be more full of consciousness and experience
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than all the months of being
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a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home.
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And by the way, that coffee,
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that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs,
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actually mimics the effect
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of those baby neurotransmitters.
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So what's it like to be a baby?
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It's like being in love
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in Paris for the first time
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after you've had three double-espressos.
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(Laughter)
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That's a fantastic way to be,
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but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning.
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(Laughter)
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Now it's good to be a grownup.
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I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are.
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It's good to be a grownup.
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We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves.
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And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort
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into making babies think like adults do.
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But if what we want is to be like those butterflies,
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to have open-mindedness, open learning,
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imagination, creativity, innovation,
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maybe at least some of the time
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we should be getting the adults
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to start thinking more like children.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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